So I’ve slowly gotten accustomed to either studying every night or trying to study every night. And it’s not that bad, I guess. Never in my high school or college careers would I have ever dreamed that I, of all people, would do it, but it really becomes quite necessary. Unlike many of my friends, I don’t feel like it’s an oppressive burden that stops me from doing anything else, but I see how it could get that way.

The thing I don’t really appreciate, though, is the effect that studying right before bed has. It’s just annoying. Even right now, when exams are weeks away and I’m not particularly concerned about the amount of material I’m learning, I will half-wake up in the middle of the night finding myself going over the branches of the external carotid artery as it ascends the neck. I will wake up in the morning and immediately think, “Drugs did I went over last night — rifampicin, binds bacterial RNA polymerase; tamoxifen, breast cancer drug, antagonist of estrogen hormone receptors for RNAPII.”

Probably most disturbing example: I opened the Glamour magazine Guy bought for me last month to calm me down right before exams, and the first thing I see is an Elizabeth Arden ad with Catherine Zeta-Jones, and my eye zooms to the claims of their Ceramide Face Cream or whatever, and my mind goes, “Ceramide, we learned that. Sphingosine and serine and a fatty acid, backbone of glycolipids.” And then I think for about a minute on whether, based on its biochemical properties, ceramide really could help your face or not. (And I decided it’s quite possible that it does.)

I’m not throwing out all this (arguably useless) M1 knowledge to prove that I’m an awesome student. Okay, perhaps part of me is, but mostly, these are real examples of thoughts I’ve had over the last nine hours. This is particularly disturbing to me when I consider for about eight of those hours I was sleeping.

So I have come to believe, even when you are me, the possibly most calm, least stressed, least currently worried medical student in your group of friends: you may just find yourself dreaming about the twelve cranial nerves.

Note: I don’t know if everybody wants to read about the dissection of cadavers, which will, I imagine, be the main topic of my posts about Anatomy. So, I will attempt to preface all such posts with a warning such as this one: this post discusses human dissection. Human dissection is not always pretty. Once I figure out cut tags, I will do them/add them to this page. Until then, you have been warned.

Gross lab (Gross and Developmental Anatomy lab, so “gross” as in “comprehensive,” though I’m sure professors everywhere giggled when they came up with the name) is the class which newly minted medical students seem to either be super excited about or absolutely dreading, because you either “get to” or “have to” cut up dead people. I was neutral of course (see: title of blog), and mostly curious as to how it would go. I’d seen the labs and the cadavers (though they were all covered with plastic sheaths), and the smell was mostly formaldehyde, reminiscent of fetal pigs but multipled about a thousand times for both weight and sheer number. At our school, the large room has maybe thirty cadavers in it, and the small room has about fifteen. It really is an overwhelming number of dead people for two rooms.

Anyway, back to the first day of lecture. Beforehand we all avidly discussed whether or not we were supposed to change into our scrubs for lecture. We knew we were supposed to wear our scrubs into lab — you know, so that dead person residue didn’t get on our street clothes. Just the ones we’d bought especially for that purpose. Eventually it was a mass, 150-person decision to change. After crowding the four bathrooms we knew about, we all filed in on time, wearing the green or blue scrubs we’d bought at orientation and having not an idea of what to expect. Well, I didn’t, at least. Other people had, of course, pre-studied. Whether by chance or by subconscious design, I don’t really associate with those people.

Our professor looked at us and grinned, “You all look very powerful in your blue and green.”

The first lecture was extremely basic, on the names of the different planes of the body and anatomical jargon. I tried to capture the information in my mind at the moment and I failed. Little did I know that after merely being in the lab for three hours a day, three days a week, I’d have no problem figuring out the lingo. (It would be the names of the muscles, nerves, and blood vessels that would cause trouble.)

After the lecture, our professor informed us we’d be seeing a video on the dissection we would be doing for the day. He dimmed the lights and started the movie.

The room in the video was dark, and the camera focused on our professor’s hands as he casually announced, “Today, we will be skinning the upper back.” Just like opening a can of soup or something. He cut into the flesh without flinching, finding the appropriate level of skin and then pulling it back and gently applying his scalpel to the mesh-like web that was attaching it to the muscle beneath. It looked … simple. Detached, from the close-up view the camera was affording us. It was easy to forget it was a human under his blade.

When my three lab partners and I assembled in front of the body, however, it was a different story.

We introduced ourselves, met each other’s eyes nervously, donned gloves and took our time figuring out how to put on scalpel blades. Then we pulled off the sheet.

The man was face-down, thankfully, but his back felt disturbingly real, far more real than the movie we’d just watched. For whatever reason, a human body with its skin off is far more easy to handle than a human body with its skin on. With no skin, the owner of the body is clearly not alive. With skin, the man could be sleeping. Gray, and clearly cold to the touch, but still. He’s still a whole person, or at least a whole body.

I glanced at the enthusaistic table next to us, who throughout the semester would be happily carving into their cadaver at a far faster pace than us. The first day was no different — it looked like they were sawing into the skin with no problem.

Oh, damn. As soon as I wrote the title for this post I realized that I am, in fact, using what I thought was a very, very trite simile when it was presented to us at our first-year orientation. What is worse is that I’m saying that the simile is true. I hate when I am one of a crowd, or when I reiterate what other people have said already.

So yes, during orientation, one very kind student affairs dean told us that medical school would probably be like a roller coaster. Before exams would be our very lowest lows, and afterwards we would be flying high — only to drop down again in like six weeks. To be honest it was not a very inspiring speech, and I remember thinking to myself, “That won’t happen to me.”

Lo and behold, alas, alack, etc., for here I am, feeling woefully pitiful for myself, when just seven hours ago today I felt fine. About seven hours ago I felt like I really knew my shit. I presented in my anatomy lab and I knew every answer, not only to my question but to the other ones that were asked too. I took a practice exam and I did well. I looked at my notes and felt like I had all the material pretty much down, and, foolishly, didn’t even know what to study.

Then I took another practice exam and got like 80% of it wrong. I looked up the answers and they were things I knew at one point, or things I should’ve known, or even things I knew but just plain screwed up on. I experienced emotional stress as well, and handled it even more poorly than I probably would’ve at another time, because studying and forcing myself to study is wearing me out. And I’m resorting to drugs (okay, Tylenol PM) to get me to sleep.

I never thought of myself as an emotionally unstable person, but maybe I’ve been fooling myself for years. I hate drama, yet here I am being dramatic. I could be (and was, for the past year) at an easy job making a perfectly decent living, instead of putting myself through this stress. Most of the time I think it’s not so bad, but right now, in the eleventh hour, I find myself wondering, is it really worth it?

Hm, writing it just now was a lot more intimidating than the actual lead-up to it has been so far. Isn’t it ridiculous, though? In undergraduate I would have basically just started classes, but as a medical student I already feel like I’ve been a medical student forever.

Anyway, I should probably disappear into a hole (a studying hole), but instead I will share a story.

Yesterday one of my classes, a small group, let out early. Like the good little first-year I am, I decided to use the extra time to study. Like the social creature who hates studying I am, I decided to sit in a very common area, where a lot of people would walk by, so that when other people’s groups started letting out, they would walk by me and distract me.

After about fifteen minutes, someone I knew walked by, and stopped. “Studying?”

“Of course,” I replied.

“Are you going to be here for a little?” he asked. At my nod, he put his (very full) backpack down next to me and stretched out on the cushioned bench I was sitting on.

“I am so exhausted,” he half-moaned.

“You look it,” I said. “Were you here last night?”

“Yeah,” he said. A heck of a lot of students at my school study at the physical school. I have been unable, so far, to bring myself to do such a thing. I much prefer studying at home, with all of my books at easy access, without having to lug everything somewhere else — but that’s just me.

“How late were you here?” I asked.

He picked up his head a little to look at me. “You really want to know?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“I was here until 5AM or something,” he said.

“That’s crazy,” I replied. Then I grinned and, a little impishly I suppose, said, “I’m pretty much in bed by 11 every night.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What specialty did you want to go into, again?” Implying, of course, that it must not be a very good one.

That last sentence right there exemplifies an attitude that some med students have that I really, really dislike. A lot. It is this feeling that if you are not punishing yourself, if you are not studying until ungodly hours of the night and depriving yourself of everything you enjoy, you must not be a good student. Conversely, if you are haggard-looking and haven’t seen home in a few days, you must be an awesome student who knows everything.

Okay, so it’s quite possible that this friend of mine was joking. But it still points at this underlying idea that I have definitely seen in a lot of my classmates, and I think it’s just plain wrong. Not only because I think/know I am a pretty good student, but because I don’t think that anyone should be pushing themselves in that way and then crowing about it. If I had to study until 4:30AM in order to know the material, I probably would, but I wouldn’t be happy about it. And it seems to me like these people, in a mild, backwards way, are.

I’ve now been in medical school for about four weeks. Five? I don’t know … orientation managed to sneak its way in there, too.

I am at Relatively Okay, which I’m often starting to consider as more than just “relatively okay.” I’ve only wondered a handful of times what would’ve happened if I’d gotten into Top Tier, though I probably will continue to wonder that throughout the next four years (and hey, maybe even throughout my career. I hope not. I guess we’ll see). I have to say one of those times was this feeling of overwhelming jealousy for the people currently at that school, but, so it is.

I have no regrets about not getting into Medium Prestige though :). I was ready to move.

Guy is down here with me and so far things are fine. Occasionally it’s a little stressful, but I mostly study at home and he just reads or phones the friends he left behind for me!, so it’s not that bad.

Now that I’m in school, I have no shame about posting some of my interview stories, which is something I’ve been waiting a while to do. I think it’ll be fun. And maybe useful to some of the aspiring students out there. And eventually I’m going to post my thoughts on the jumble that’s been my first month, but I haven’t had time to organize those so it might take a while.